If you haven’t heard Google announced they will be launching Real-time search. It will essentially be your regular search results that will integrate relevant content that you produce on social networks. The networks will include Facebook (only public pages and Fan pages), MySpace, and of course Twitter. Here is a short video that shows exactly what it is:
Pretty cool and pretty necessary for Google to live on as kingpin in the search game. What does the slick new feature really mean for content producers though? It seems like it may be a double-edged sword. There is the possibility that you can gain more audience, if not directly then to your presence on social networks, which of course means you’ll need to be on point in terms of your brand and content in these places. Then there is the other possibility that since it is real-time you may just get drowned out in the overflowing ocean of content that the addition of real-time provides. You’ll likely have to produce more content, produce it quicker, and you certainly will have to be on point when it comes to writing headlines and tagging content. Remember how conversations on Twitter and Facebook are somewhat brief? You’ll tweet something there will be an exchange, some topics go viral and have a longer life but the majority of them don’t. I’m sure we’ll notice this will change with real-time search. Topical conversations will be promoted and strung out as far as possible just so they will appear as the latest in real-time search.
I haven’t even begun to think what this will mean for the various Google tools we use like Analytics, AdWords, and AdSense. One thing’s for sure, times are changing and they are changing in real-time so you’ll have to keep up.